In February 2000, George W. Bush’s presidential campaign was in peril heading into the South Carolina primary. John McCain had just scored an unexpected victory in New Hampshire, and his candidacy was picking up steam. The Bush campaign was fighting for its life. What happened next is political lore. Push polls and flyers began appearing around South Carolina that blatantly accused, or implicitly suggested, that McCain’s adopted daughter from Bangladesh was really “a Negro child” he fathered out of wedlock. The end result? Record high turnout, an 11-point Bush primary victory, and the stifling of McCain’s momentum that effectively ended his chances at securing the nomination.

Twelve years earlier, his father, George H. W. Bush, was facing similar dire circumstances. He was down 7 points to Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis in August of 1988. But in September, the Bush campaign began attacking Massachusetts’s furlough program under Dukakis by running an ad about Willie Horton, a convicted murderer sentenced to life without parole, who raped a woman and stabbed her fiancé while on weekend furlough. The ad’s racial overtones were not lost on anyone. By October, there’d been a sea change in the polls and Bush was up by 10 points, a wave he rode to convincing victory.

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While no single factor is solely responsible for these electoral outcomes, fanning the fires of racial division has long been an effective campaign strategy. Two hundred years before McCain was accused of having an affair with a black woman, Thomas Jefferson was denounced by the opposition as “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.”

Donald Trump, the champion of a previous instantiation of the Obama birther movement, kicked the summer off by labeling Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. Ben Carson has compared Obamacare and abortion to slavery and declared that Islam isn’t consistent with the Constitution. Jeb Bush has blamed Asians for using “anchor babies” to hustle American citizenship. Chris Christie has associated a movement geared to draw attention to aggressive policing of black people with intentional black criminality towards police. Hillary Clinton was accused of using racial divisiveness when she said then-Senator Obama would be unable to win over the “hard-working Americans, white Americans” necessary to win the general election.

Political contests are emotional, high-stakes affairs and few topics stir up American passion like race. As a campaign strategy, race can have a polarizing effect that causes some voters to prioritize the issue when they wouldn’t otherwise, and impact voter turnout. More recently, the objective has been to drive up white-conservative voter turnout to counter the moderate and increasing liberal minority vote. Following Obama’s reelection, Rush Limbaugh argued that the Republican Party didn’t need better minority outreach to win elections, only higher white turnout. But does using race as a wedge issue really work?

Does using race as a wedge issue really work?

Some scholarship suggests that racially coded appeals can indeed be highly effective. The late sociologist Hubert Blalock’s racial-threat theory is the most cited explanation for this phenomenon. It argues that when there is interracial competition for access to resources—like jobs, government funds, good schools, and safe communities—the race in power feels threatened by other races’ growing populations and political voice, and therefore takes measures to protect power and privilege. Studies have also shown that minority enfranchisement does indeed divert resources. In a National Bureau of Economic Research paper, Dartmouth professor Elizabeth Cascio and Yale professor Ebonya Washington found that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 caused a “significant shift in distribution of state aid toward localities with higher proportions of black residents.” When citizens become part of the political process, they gain the ability to claim its benefits.

But since the civil-rights era, explicitly racialized appeals to the electorate usually backfire on the candidates, largely because of societal norms surrounding racial equality. In short, explicit racism is a societal taboo with which many people, regardless of partisanship, don’t want to be associated. In her book, The Race Card, Tali Mendelberg argues that because politicians and voters want to adhere to this norm of social equality, some of them resort to employing and responding to implicit messages of racial resentment to maintain or increase political power and socioeconomic status. This is where the use of code words prove particularly useful in political communication—from Richard Nixon’s “law and order” to Ronald Reagan’s “states’ rights” to the euphemistic “urban” and “inner-city.”

But Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” saw little success when employed in its explicitly racist form. The 1970 midterm elections were an indictment of the strategy—Nixon’s race-baiting anti-busing campaign ended up hurting GOP candidates. He realized much more success with his “Suburban Strategy,” or “New Majority” approach of coded, colorblind appeals in 1972.

Perhaps no one understood this better than Reagan. During his 1980 campaign, memos reveal that he and his strategists employed a calculated approach: broadcast conservative messages to the public without appearing racist, reactionary, or hostile. This “Reagan Focused Impact” approach meant that while Reagan spoke of states’ rights to white, southern audiences, he also spoke of self-determination and local power to northern black audiences. As his strategists argued, this approach generated positive press for Reagan from all quarters—especially white moderates—and effectively neutralized attacks from black activists, making the racialized aspects of his campaign hard to pin down.

While Reagan still employed a form of racial divisiveness through the coded language of states’ rights or welfare queens (as he had done in the past), he also began to speak more of inequality and discrimination to black audiences. His campaign knew that in order to win the White House, politicians had to be more artful in their messaging since they could no longer rely on explicitly racialized tropes designed to stir white resentment.

Use of such strategies does not mean that those who employ them are racists, but it shows a willingness to exploit societal ills for political gain.

But that may not be the case today with the rise of Trump and Carson. Their surge in the polls suggests that their use of race as a wedge issue proved beneficial to their campaigns.

The potential explanation of this is two-fold. First, the diversity of the Republican field—two Hispanic men, one black man, and one of Indian descent—has provided a convincing counter-narrative to any implication that the party is exploiting racial divisiveness for political gain. And second, that diversity does not extend to the Republican primary electorate, which, as of 2012, was over 90 percent white. Taken together, this means the use of racial divisiveness to increase white turnout can bear fruit while protecting its practitioners from charges that they are violating norms of social-equality. After all, how can supporting the black candidate mean a voter is interested in disenfranchising black people?

The result is a laundry list of policy positions on race-centric issues that have the effect of polarizing the electorate. For example, Republican candidates’ positions on immigration continue to evolve to the point that anything short of deportation and wall construction on the border is construed on the trail as support for amnesty. When voter-identification laws and the conservative principle of reduction in government size and services are taken together, they effectively reassign the power to distribute state aid, and limit its scale. Even affirmative action is returning to the U.S. Supreme Court for the third term in a row, an occurrence that raises doubt about the use of race in college admissions going forward. Each of these is symptomatic of the use of racialized appeals as a form of protectionism for dwindling resources.

It remains to be seen whether racial divisiveness as a campaign strategy can still help produce victories as it did in 1988 and 2000. It may be the case that it’s a useful approach in some primary contests, but quite damaging in a general election with a more diverse electorate. In any event, the use of such strategies does not mean that those who employ them are racists, but it does show a willingness to exploit societal ills for political gain. As Warren Rudd once said, “Desperate people do desperate things ... they grab on for anything they can get ahold of, and if it happens to be something nasty, rotten, and false, that doesn’t make much difference.”

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The special counsel indicted the Russian nationals and three Russian entities for allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election, the Department of Justice announced Friday.

On Friday, February 16, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosentein announced that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, had indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities on charges that including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft. This is the full text of that indictment.

Students have mourned and rallied the public after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High that left 17 dead.

Something was different about the mass shooting this week in Parkland, Florida, in which 14 students and three adults were killed.

It was not only the death toll. The mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High became the deadliest high-school shooting in American history (edging out Columbine, which killed 13 in 1999).

What made Parkland different were the people who stepped forward to describe it. High-school students—the survivors of the calamity themselves—became the voice of the tragedy. Tweets that were widely reported as coming from the students expressed grief for the victims, pushed against false reports, and demanded accountability.

Outrage mobs are chipping away at democracy, one meaningless debate at a time.

The mob was unusually vociferous, even for Twitter. After the California-born ice skater Mirai Nagasu became the first American woman to land a triple axel at the Olympics, the New York Times writer Bari Weiss commented “Immigrants: They get the job done.”

What followed that innocuous tweet was one of the sillier, manufactured controversies I have ever seen on Twitter. Twitter’s socially conscious denizens probably only realized they should be outraged at Weiss after they saw other people being outraged, as is so often the case. Outside of Twitter, some of Weiss’s Times colleagues were also offended by the tweet—and even hurt by it. The critics’objection was that Nagasu isn’t herself an immigrant, but rather the child of immigrants, and so calling her one was an example of “perpetual othering.”

Tech analysts are prone to predicting utopia or dystopia. They’re worse at imagining the side effects of a firm's success.

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At least, that’s one interpretation.

A second story of this age of technological transformation says that it’s mostly a facade—that the last 30 years have been a productivity bust and little has changed in everyday life, aside from the way everyone reads and watches videos. People wanted flying cars and got Netflix binges instead.

Let’s call these the Disrupt Story and the Dud Story of technology. When a new company, app, or platform emerges, it’s common for analysts to divide into camps—Disrupt vs. Dud—with some yelping that the new thing will change everything and others yawning with the expectation that traditionalism will win out.

The Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig discusses how Aaron Swartz's death shaped his own life's work.

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The two developed a mentorship and partnership that would lead them to take on the complex goals of making information more accessible and demanding greater transparency from political institutions. Swartz became known for his involvement in Creative Commons and Reddit, and for his alleged attempt to make information from the academic-research site JSTOR free for public viewing. And then, in January of 2013, Swartz committed suicide. Lessig is still reeling from the loss.

The clear goal of the special counsel is to speak to the American public about the seriousness of Russian interference.

With yet another blockbuster indictment (why is it always on a Friday afternoon?), Special Counsel Robert Mueller has, once again, upended Washington. And this time, it is possible that his efforts may have a wider effect outside the Beltway.

For those following the matter, there has been little doubt that Russian citizens attempted to interfere with the American presidential election. The American intelligence agencies publicized that conclusion more than a year ago in a report issued in January 2017, and it has stood by the analysis whenever it has been questioned. But some in the country have doubted the assertion—asking for evidence of interference that was not forthcoming.

Now the evidence has been laid out in painful detail by the special counsel. If any significant fraction of what is alleged in the latest indictment is true (and we should, of course, remind ourselves that an indictment is just an allegation—not proof), then this tale is a stunning condemnation of Russian activity. A Russian organization with hundreds of employees and a budget of millions of dollars is said to have systematically engaged in an effort (code named “Project Lakhta”) to undermine the integrity of the election and, perhaps more importantly, to have attempted to influence the election to benefit then-candidate Donald Trump. Among the allegations, the Russians:

The director Ryan Coogler's addition to the Marvel pantheon is a superb genre film—and quite a bit more.

Note: Although this review avoids plot spoilers, it does discuss the thematic elements of the film at some length.

After an animated introduction to the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda, Black Panther opens in Oakland in 1992. This may seem an odd choice, but it is in fact quite apt. The film’s director, Ryan Coogler, got his start in the city, having been born there in 1986. His filmmaking career has its roots there, too, as it was the setting for his debut feature, Fruitvale Station.

A bunch of schoolboys (a fictionalized young Coogler perhaps among them) play pickup hoops on a court with a milk-crate basket. But in the tall apartment building above them two black radicals are plotting a robbery. There’s a knock on the door and one of the men looks through the peephole: “Two Grace Jones–lookin’ chicks—with spears!” I won’t recount the rest of the scene, except to note that the commingling of two very different iterations of the term “Black Panther”—the comic-book hero and the revolutionary organization, ironically established just months apart in 1966—is in no way accidental, and it will inform everything that follows.

Like it or not, the middle class became global citizens through consumerism—and they did so at the mall.

“Okay, we’ll see you in two-and-a-half hours,” the clerk tells me, taking the iPhone from my hand. I’m at the Apple Store, availing myself of a cheap smartphone battery replacement, an offer the company made after taking heat for deliberately slowing down devices. A test run by a young woman typing at a feverish, unnatural pace on an iPad confirms that mine desperately needed the swap. As she typed, I panicked. What will I do in the mall for so long, and without a phone? How far the mall has fallen that I rack my brain for something to do here.

The Apple Store captures everything I don’t like about today’s mall. A trip here is never easy—the place is packed and chaotic, even on weekdays. It runs by its own private logic, cashier and help desks replaced by roving youths in seasonally changing, colored T-shirts holding iPads, directing traffic.

The company’s unusual offer—to give employees up to $5,000 for leaving—may actually be a way to get them to stay longer.

On Monday, Amazon reportedly began a series of rare layoffs at its headquarters in Seattle, cutting several hundred corporate employees. But this week, something quite different is happening at the company’s warehouses and customer-service centers across the country: Amazon will politely ask its “associates”—full-time and part-time hourly employees—if they’d prefer to quit. And if they do, Amazon will pay them as much as $5,000 for walking out the door.

Officially called “The Offer,” this proposition is, according to Amazon, a way to encourage unhappy employees to move on. “We believe staying somewhere you don’t want to be isn’t healthy for our employees or for the company,” Ashley Robinson, an Amazon spokesperson, wrote to me in an email. The amount full-time employees get offered ranges from $2,000 to $5,000, and depends on how long they have been at the company; if they take the money, they agree to never work for Amazon again. (The idea for all this originated at Zappos, the online shoe retailer that Amazon bought in 2009.)

Leggings and yoga gear are common sights at practice rinks. But in competition, gender-coded costumes still prevail.

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More accurately, she did it in a bedazzled black unitard, but that didn’t stop news outlets and viewers on Twitter from pointing out Méité’s eye-catching, subtly subversive pants. “This French figure skater may not have won a medal, but her pants took people's choice,” raved Yahoo! News, and AOL named Méité’s bodysuit to its list of “most dazzling figure skating outfits” of these Olympic Games.